Essence

Presented by SigSoft with Dr. Ivar Jacobson & Guests

In late 2018 and early 2019, Sigsoft (Special Interest Group on Software Engineering) arranged a webinar series with Ivar Jacobson and his colleagues. They were recorded by SigSoft and are available for viewing on SigSoft’s website via registration. The three webinars are: ‘50 Years of Software Engineering, so what now’, ‘Essence in Action’, and ‘What is Essence?’

Contract Bridge – Defining your Business Relationship

In the 6th blog of our series, Brian and Ian present the Contract Bridge game played with the Scrum Essential cards. The game is useful wherever there is a perceived boundary between a Scrum Team and its customers.

An ACM Queue Publication

The way we develop software struggles to keep pace with changes in technology and business. Even with the rise of agile, people still flip-flop from one branded method to another, throwing away the good with the bad and behaving more like religious cultists than like scientists.

This article explains why we need to break out of this repetitive dysfunctional behavior, and it introduces Essence, a new way of thinking that promises to free the practices from their method prisons and thus enable true
learning organizations.

Practice Mapping – An Experience Report

In the fifth blog post of this series, Brian Kerr and Ian Spence an experience report of a team learning and applying the Practice Mapping game. The power of this game is to see inside the mind of others and have useful discussions about the results.

In a recent blog by Fujitsu’s Rob Devlen, Fujitsu and IJI go Agile with Essence, Devlen describes how Ivar Jacobson International (IJI) worked with Fujitsu to create a workshop to build an understanding of Agile for their top 100 executives and senior managers in the EMEIA region. The blog article describes how we created that interactive workshop with them, facilitated the session and the results obtained. In this article we’ll show you a flavour of some of the content.

In a recent blog by Fujitsu’s Rob Devlen, Fujitsu and IJI go Agile with Essence, Devlen describes how Ivar Jacobson International (IJI) worked with Fujitsu to create a workshop to build an understanding of Agile for their top 100 executives and senior managers in the EMEIA region. The blog article describes how we created that interactive workshop with them, facilitated the session and the results obtained. In this article we’ll show you a flavour of some of the content.

Learn with Practice Mapping

In the fourth blog post of this series, Brian Kerr and Ian Spence provide directions to use the Scrum Essential Cards to play the Practice Mapping game. You can use this game to test the understanding of individuals or small groups, particularly as part of a training event.

Practice Patience: An Experience Report

In part three of this blog series, Brian and Ian review how a team played the Practice Patience game. They had been a Scrum team for over 6 months and were used to holding more traditional open ‘brainstorming’ style of retrospectives. The article reviews their experience with the cards guiding them to improve their application of Scrum, including some quotes from their Scrum Master.

Ivar Jacobson International produced the cards in conjunction with Dr. Jeff Sutherland, the co-creator of Scrum - applying the Essence standard to build a helpful reference guide to the essential elements of Scrum. The cards make it easier to communicate with team members, improve team collaboration and provide better overviews.

Standing Room Only to Hear Ivar Discuss 50 Years of Software Engineering: So now what?

On June 1st, Dr. Ivar Jacobson delivered a keynote address at the annual International Conference on Software Engineering. Ivar shared his views on the history of software engineering to date and where we need to go from here.

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